Silent Herdsman

For the average dairy cow, milk production peaks during the time she is in heat. For dairy farmers, to pin point that moment is critical: increased yields = increased revenue.

Dairy farmers must give their buyers accurate predictions of their milk production each year. Traditional methods have made it increasingly difficult to predict, putting pressure on the farmers. Until now.

Silent Herdsman partnered with ThoughtWorks to create a technology solution that enables farmers to accurately predict their milk production for each year.

How it works: The cows wear a collar that contains a 3D accelerometer which transmits data back to the base station in the farm. Typically when a cow is on heat she will move much more than usual, so the cow's movements are monitored to let the farmer know the optimal time to milk. The collar has the added benefit of giving the farmer insight to the herd, ensuring it is as healthy as possible in order to maximise the amount of milk being produced. It also helps identify any sick animals as early as possible. mySilent Herdsman is the new, more scalable, cloud-based Silent Herdsman solution.

ThoughtWorks took mySilent Herdsman from inception to release, with the MVP (minimum viable product) being rolled out to selected trial farms in just six weeks.

The software shows the farmer:

Mini dashboard when they log into mySilent Herdsman

All the cows on their farm

Biological information relating to each cow

Activity graph showing the movement of each cow

The activity graph also illustrates when a cow has had an increased movement signalling when the cow is most fertile

Oestrus alerts are highlighted to the farmer, with specific date and time information

mySilent Herdsman is synced to the farmer's Farm PC, so whenever anything is changed on the Farm PC the changes are updated on mySilent Herdsman

ThoughtWorks proposal focused not only on providing the technological solution, but also providing business analysis, interactions with the customers and going out to research what our customers wanted, not just what we wanted.

— Michael Gilroy, Chief Engineer - Silent Herdsman

All environments were built in the Cloud using Amazon Web Services. The technology:

Silent HerdsmanOne of the reasons that we are so excited to work with Silent Herdsman was, I think they've taken advantage of the powerful but low-power consuming devices that are available now, being able to get a large amount of compute power into a very small package and have a battery life for several years. They're also using that to solve a real world problem in quite an innovative way. So that was very exciting for us. What we were able to do is say, well, look, we can create a solution in the cloud. We can use some of the great features of [? Adamson, ?] especially around elasticity, which means we could start small and then scale things up as we need to and then also build a mobile web app that will connect to the servers in the cloud and make that data available. ThoughtWorks, because we're focused not only available technological solution, but also providing business analysis, interactions with the customers, and going out and doing the research to work out what our customers wanted not what we wanted. So I've been out [INAUDIBLE] a farm. We started of doing paper prototypes with the farmers, and we're just getting their initial feedback. And we iterated on that during this process. And we built an interactive prototype, where they're actually able to touch it. And now today, we can actually user test them with the final application. In the end, we want to make this as easy as possible for them to be able to serve cows, and we want to know what features we can build to make the farmers' life easier. So we're comfortable that by building this out in the cloud in the way we have, we can scale up. We can cope with very large amounts of data without having to go and rebuild anything. I think [INAUDIBLE] that's really interesting is going to other regions and geographies. And again, because we're using Amazon and because we've automated everything, we can take the scripts that we've run against the European Amazon instances and go and run them in the US-- basically recreate the entire environment in the US or the far east very, very quickly. So those are I think two key areas where we could go next.